Margaret Deland

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Margaret Deland (born Margaretta Wade Campbell; February 23, 1857 – January 13, 1945) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She also wrote an autobiography in two volumes. She generally is considered part of the literary realism movement.

BiographyEdit

File:Greywood, Kennebunkport, ME.jpg

Greywood, Margaret Deland's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine

Margaretta Wade Campbell was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (today a part of Pittsburgh) on February 23, 1857. Her mother died due to complications from the birth, and she was left in the care of an aunt named Lois Wade and her husband Benjamin Campbell Blake.<ref name=Levenson454>Levenson, J. C. Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (Edward T. James, editor). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971: Vol. I, 454. Template:ISBN</ref>

On May 12, 1880, she married Lorin F. Deland. Her husband had inherited his father's publishing company, which he sold in 1886 and worked in advertising.<ref name=Levenson454/> It was at this period she began to write, first writing verses for her husband's greeting-card business.<ref name=Levenson454/> Her first poem was published in the March 1885 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine and her first poetry collection, titled The Old Garden and Other Verses, was published in late 1886 by Houghton Mifflin.<ref name=Filer6>Filer, Ruth Maxa. Margaret Deland Writing Toward Insight. Bloomington, IN: Balboa Press, 2014: 6. Template:ISBN</ref> Her novel John Ward, Preacher, her first, was published in 1888.<ref name=Filer6/>

Deland and her husband moved to Boston, Massachusetts and, over a four-year span, they took in and supported unmarried mothers at their residence at 76 Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill. They also maintained the summer home Greywood, overlooking the Kennebunk River in Kennebunkport, Maine.<ref name=Burr>Template:Cite book</ref> It was in this home that Canadian actress Margaret Anglin visited in 1909, and the two women reviewed Deland's manuscript for The Awakening of Helena Richie. Anglin reported "I never spent a pleasanter time than I did while Mrs. Deland and I chugged up and down the little Kennbunkport Template:Sic River in a boat, talking over the future of Helena Richie."<ref>LeVay, John. Margaret Anglin: A Stage Life. Toronto: Dundurn, 1989: 116. Template:ISBN</ref> The Delands kept their summer home in Maine for about 50 years.<ref name=Burr/>

In 1910, Deland wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly, recognizing the ongoing struggles for women's rights in the United States: "Restlessness!" she wrote, "A prevailing discontent among women — a restlessness infinitely removed from the content of a generation ago."<ref>Wetzsteon, Ross. Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007: 166. Template:ISBN</ref> During World War I, Deland did relief work in France; she was awarded a cross from the Legion of Honor for her work.<ref name=Levenson454/> "She received a Litt.D. from Bates College in 1920. In 1926, she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters<ref name=Levenson454/> along with Edith Wharton, Agnes Repplier and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. The election of these four women to the organization was said to have "marked the letting down of the bars to women."<ref name="nyt1926">"First Women Elected to Institute of Arts; Edith Wharton Among the Four Chosen – American Academy Makes Two Men Members," New York Times. November 12, 1926.</ref> Deland was also a member of an informal women's social club that met regularly and included Amy Beach, Alice Howe Gibbens (wife of William James), and Ida Agassiz (wife of Henry Lee Higginson).<ref>Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: 110. Template:ISBN</ref>

By 1941, Deland had published 33 books.<ref name=Burr/> She died in Boston at the Hotel Sheraton, where she then lived, in 1945.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery. Her home on Mount Vernon Street is a stop on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Critical responseEdit

Deland is known principally for the novel John Ward, Preacher (1888), an indictment of Calvinism, which became a best-seller.<ref name=Lang173>Lang, Eleanor. Art of the Real World: Eight American Women Realists. Rowman & Littlefield, 1979: 173. Template:ISBN</ref> Her 'Old Chester' books, based on her early memories of the Pittsburgh communities where she grew up — including Maple Grove and Manchester — were also popular. She was recognized as an important and popular author of literary realism in the United States, but some of her plots and themes were shocking to some.<ref name=Lang173/> In her lifetime, she was called the American Mrs. Humphry Ward and was compared to Elizabeth Gaskell.<ref name=Levenson454/>